After David Ferrie died on February 22, 1967, Perry Russo contacted Jim Garrison and Andrew Sciambra was sent to Baton Rouge to interview him. The infamous Sciambra Memorandum fails to note Russo describing any party where the conspiracy to assassinate JFK was discussed. There is also not one mention of a Clay Bertrand. Russo said he had previously met Clay Shaw twice - once at the Nashville wharf when JFK came to speak, and once at a service station. No mention of Shaw being at a party. His description of Clay Shaw belies belief (Shaw was a conservative dresser).

For those of you who have not read the Sciambra Memorandum, well, here it is:

Russo was then brought to New Orleans on February 27, 1967, and that night was injected with sodium pentothal, a so-called truth serum. There is no transcript of that session, but here is the memo that Sciambra wrote:

Note that Ferrie's roommate, "very dirty and a beatnik-type guy" who "had a bushy beard and his hair was all messed up and he was extremely dirty," is again Oswald Of course, the real Oswald was clean-shaven and paid attention to personal hygiene.

And, what are the effects of sodium pentothal. Here is a letter to the editor of the Washington Post from March 1967:

Perry Russo was then hypnotized three times. The first session was on March 1, 1967. Click here for the annotated transcript. Just take a look at some of the leading questions.

The second session was held on March 9, 1967 but Russo supposedly regressed too far back and there is no surviving transcript.

Here is the actual recording of the third session, held on March 14, 1967.

You can follow along with an annotated transcript.

Two things were going on - first, Garrison's men were manufacturing a false memory, and second, they were fusing the Clay Bertrand story with the David Ferrie story. And what else could they do? Their investigation in New Orleans had come up completely empty.

For a complete rundown of the discrepancies and contradictions in Perry Russo's stories, please see my earlier blog post.